How To Think Real Good
I enjoy thinking about thinking. That’s one reason I spent a dozen years in artificial intelligence research. To make a computer think, you’d need to understand how you think. So AI research is a way of thinking about thinking that forces you to be specific. It calls your bluff if you think you understand thinking, but don’t.
I thought a lot about how to do AI. 1 In 1988, I put together “How to do research at the MIT AI Lab,” a guide for graduate students. Although I edited it, it was a collaboration of many people. There are now many similar guides, some of them better, but this was the first. Most of its advice was not specific to AI or MIT, and for many years after I got emails with thanks from researchers in all sorts of different fields.
Soon after, I realized that AI was a dead end, and left the field. Although my work in AI was influential, it seemed worthless in retrospect. I had a personal crisis: what should I do instead? The feedback on “How to do research” suggested that my thoughts about how to think would be useful more widely. And, I had worked in various fields besides AI, which had their own ways of thinking. My perspective was uncommonly broad.
